Twenty-two years after its first major incursion, and 18 years after it launched a singularly unsuccessful invasion, Israel yesterday pulled its last soldiers out of Lebanon, locked the border gates and braced itself for a future no one can predict with any certainty.
The returning soldiers, withdrawn overnight under Hizbullah fire, but sustaining no casualties on the short journeys home, had the look of victors, not vanquished, their features wreathed in smiles, saluting, singing, calling home from their mobile phones. "We're the last ones, that's it," crowed a soldier atop an armoured personnel carrier at the end of the last convoy in. "It's over. We're out."
But these relieved celebrations were eclipsed as day broke by those of the genuine victors - the gunmen of Hizbullah and their ecstatic supporters, waving Hizbullah flags and tearing and burning Israeli ones.
Revelling in the reversal of circumstance, dozens of them paraded along the road just across the Israeli border fence, posing for photographs atop abandoned Israeli military vehicles, gesturing rudely at the Israeli soldiers who watched them from across the wire, waving the guns which Israel and its allies had left behind but, tellingly, never pointing them in the Israelis' direction.
Just 24 hours earlier, this same road had been jammed with fleeing soldiers from Israel's collapsed allied militia, the South Lebanon Army, waiting with their families to gain entry into Israel. About 5,000 such refugees have been admitted so far and another 5,000 are expected.
If Israelis are, for now, relieved, and Hizbullah is euphoric, it is the members of the SLA who have lost the most in this accelerated Israeli retreat.
The SLA's commander, Gen Antoine Lahad, who returned to the region yesterday after an ill-timed visit to France, was berated by his own officers for his absence in the crucial days at the start of this week, when his leaderless force disintegrated. He, in turn, vented his frustration on Israel, accusing it of a misguided, illogical, humiliating volte face. His defeated soldiers have dispersed in opposite directions: some of them, to trial and punishment in Lebanon, surrendering to Hizbullah and the Lebanese Army; the majority to a tent village on the Sea of Galilee, where many have been accusing Israel of betrayal.
But the new sense of relief in Israel - which has rapidly replaced the sense of shame over the handling of the SLA - may be short-lived. Retired Gen Yoram Yair was one of a host of military experts to warn yesterday that Israel has not yet severed itself from Lebanon, but merely changed the nature of the engagement, at tremendously high risk.
"Now we have our backs to the wall," he said. "And we can't go back any further."
Indeed, Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, somewhat vindicated by the smoothness of the overnight army departure, continues to take every opportunity to underline that, now that Israeli troops are off Lebanese soil, the retaliation if they are targeted will be massive - and will extend far beyond Hizbullah positions.
Israel's hope is that Hizbullah will use its victory to strengthen its political strength in Lebanon, not risk alienating its delirious supporters in the "liberated" security zone by provoking an Israeli response which would force the newly-returned villagers to scramble north again.
Apparently confident that northern Israel is safe, at least for now, the army told residents yesterday morning to come out of bomb shelters. But Hizbullah is still offering no guarantees and has issued no conciliatory messages. Instead, its leader, Sheikh Hussein Nasrallah, who yesterday praised "the first victory in 50 years of Arab-Israeli conflict", is calling for Israel to also pull out from the Sheba farms area on the eastern border with Syria - an area deemed by Israel, and the UN, to be outside Lebanese sovereignty - and to release the last Hizbullah prisoners from its jails.